Re: questions on cvs locking

[David H. Thornley]

Yuhe Liu wrote:
> 
> Mike,
> 
> I understand that's the way CVS was designed for multiple
> developers. However for some reasons, we want to have the
> reserved checkout on the files been updated. The file types
> we have include text code, word documents, executable binaries,
> package libraries, etc.. Most problems came from the word
> documents and libraries.

I can understand the word document problem (there are very good
reasons not to use this as a saving format, but almost everybody
does it anyway because it's convenient), but the executable
binaries and package libraries puzzle me.  Either you can rebuild
these from source, in which case you don't need them under
source control, or you got them from somewhere else and your
developers shouldn't be arbitrarily changing them.  Well, there's
other alternatives, but they're rare these days.

 The cvs edit command does not lock
> the files. It does only send a notifying message to those
> who set a watch on the files. However, many developers do
> not check their mail boxes often enough to catch the message.
> If there were multiple messages on the same files, that would
> be very confusing.
> 
Can you get your developers to check their mailboxes more often?
Besides, I'd think they'd be able to figure out that somebody
was working on a given file and coordinate, even given multiple
messages.  (I'd hope so, anyway.)

> Anyway, is there a way that we can set up an automated lock on
> the files using command `cvs edit`?
> 
Not without doing some serious rewriting or switching to another
system.  Have you looked at Noel Yap's patches at the Renegade
CVS project on Sourceforge?  He's added some functionality
to the "cvs edit" system which makes it closer to being a lock.

-- 
David H. Thornley                          Software Engineer
at CES International, Inc.:  address@hidden or (763)-694-2556
at home: (612)-623-0552 or address@hidden or
http://www.visi.com/~thornley/david/